for the note is:
>
>This note addresses the role of OWL in overcoming problems of semantic
>heterogeneity. We briefly characterize what we mean by semantic
>interoperability, and what the challenges are. We describe some OWL
>constructs that are designed to support semantic interoperability and
>illustrate them with examples. We highlight their strengths and
>limitations. The main message is that OWL is no silver bullet for the
>general problem of achieving semantic interoperability. The support
>provided is very limited. Many of these limitations will be overcome by
>the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) that is currently under
>development.
Mike - let me put this in a friendly way -- I don't like this at all.
First of all, when you compare OWL to any of the alternatives it is
way better - If you stopped after the sentence "OWL is no silver
bullet ..." I'd be fine. However, you go on to say "the support
provided is very limited" which I don't agree with, and which also is
a subjective statement at best. I would even further object to the
last sentence - first, SWRL has no official status and may not even
be the eventual choice for a standard, second SWRL has not been
tested in interoperability issues, and it is unclear to me why more
expressivity should increase the ability to do reuse -- if anything I
would actually expect the reverse in practice...
So let's keep this factual and focused, and leave the hypotheticals
out of WG notes
-JH
p.s. And in case anyone is interested, I would like to deny in the
strongest possible terms that "The support provided (for
interoperability) in OWL is very limited", the URI/RDF basis of OWL
makes the sharing of terms possible in a way that no KR langauge in
the past has ever had, and is a good part of the reason that OWL is
now the most used KR langauge in the history of AI.
--
Professor James Hendler Director, Semantic Web and
Agent Technologies
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab. 301-405-2696
8400 Baltimore Ave, Suite 200 301-314-9734 (Fax)
College Park, MD 20742 http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler